


What's Going On?

by chinesebakery



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Comedy, Drunken Shenanigans, Drunkenness, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, I Don't Even Know, Karaoke, Prompt Fic, What happened there, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 03:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6837007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chinesebakery/pseuds/chinesebakery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's double date night and Jemma's had one too many. Consequently, she can't resist the lure of the karaoke. Leo 'Boyfriend of the Year' Fitz to the rescue!</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's Going On?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Anon in response to the prompt “You have a problem, it’s only my job to help you fix it.”
> 
> Thanks to Agentcalliope for beta-reading.

The bar was already fairly crowded when Bobbi and Hunter finally made it past the door, a good twenty minutes late as per usual. Given the looks that passed between them, Fitz made a mental note not to ask, or mention in any way, what might have kept them up until now.

It had been a while since Fitz and Jemma had spent an evening out with Bobbi and Hunter, as a double date of sorts. They'd decided to keep it very low-key: a nice and unpretentious bar, a few decent beers and good conversation between friends.

They _hadn't_ anticipated the fact that this particular Friday was Karaoke night, but the four of them rapidly ruled against moving their party to another location. At the very worst, they would cringe with second-hand embarrassment while a poor fool ridiculed himself on the makeshift stage –it felt like a risk worth taking.

As it turned out, they weren't bothered much by the few patrons who attempted to approximately sing their way through hits of long gone decades. The conversation was easy and pleasant, and they shared many laughs as they reminisced of past missions and "funny-now-it's-over" 0-8-4 incidents.

Fitz's only concern was that Jemma was downing her drinks at the same pace as Bobbi, although she couldn't hold her liquor nearly as well as their friend. In a little over an hour, she'd gone from laid back to chatty to overly enthusiastic and now, she was fastly approaching the 'unpredictable' phase.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shiny, but when she insisted for having one last beer, he eventually gave in, as he so often did when she flashed him the kind of smile she saved for him only. He made another mental note, this time to make her drink a decent amount of water before bed and to strategically place some Tylenol on her nightstand.

As the evening progressed, Fitz had to make a stop to the bathroom. When he came back, he found Jemma had vacated her seat.

"Where is she?" he asked bemusedly as he sat down.

Hunter and Bobbi failed to reply, and instead looked at each other in a "no, _you_ tell him" kind of way.

"What is it?" Fitz asked again, a sense of worry sparking in his gut.

At that very moment, a familiar guitar intro raised from the amplifiers, making him cringe reflexively. _That damn song…_ He'd heard it often enough when he shared a flat with Jemma during their SciOps years. For a reason unfathomable to him, she seemed to be very fond of it.

So when an unmistakable voice began slurring through the first verse, the sound magnified by the amplifiers, Fitz's entire body froze.

"Twenty-five years and my life is still, trying to get up that great big hill of hope…"

He turned as if in slow motion and gaped a little as he took in the scene before him.

"No," he murmured to himself, horrified. "Nooooo. She's a _terrible_ singer. The worst, really."

"I think that's obvious to anybody with ears, mate," Hunter winced.

What she lacked in musicality, she made up for in confidence. She held on to that microphone like it had been the missing part of her hand her entire life and swayed to the music in a way that made Fitz grateful she hadn't picked up the kind of pop anthem that came with a racy choreography.

They watched in entranced mortification for a few moments, until Bobbi gripped Fitz's forearm hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises.

"Fitz, you can't leave her like this."

"But what can I _do_?" he lamented.

"You can rescue her. Save her from herself!"

"Do you mean– drag her away from the stage?"

 _"No,"_ she replied firmly. "Stand by her and stop her from embarrassing herself further. She has a problem–"

"More than one, I'll wager," Hunter piped.

"–and it's only your job to help fix it."

Fitz's eyes widened as the enormity of Bobbi's suggestion started to slowly sink in.

Meanwhile, Jemma was starting to really gain steam, brandishing the microphone in a classic rock star pose as she sang, "I'm feelING a little peculIAR!"

"Now, Fitz," Bobbi begged, "before it's too late for her!"

With a nod of resignation, Fitz stood up abruptly, downed the rest of his beer, and squared his shoulders.

The bar was rather small and it didn't take long for him to make his way through a crowd of diversely intoxicated people. He'd lived through many dangerous missions, but he couldn't recall ever approaching one with the amount of dread he was feeling now.

"...scream from the top of my lungs: _what's going on!?"_ Jemma screamed from the top of her lungs.

When she saw him climb on stage, her entire face lit up, to the point he almost forgot he was about to humiliate himself in front of a crowd for no other purpose than to share Jemma's public indignity.

The moment he joined her, she wrapped an arm around his waist and with the other, held the microphone up for the both of them. She rested her head on his shoulder and kept swaying as they both sung the infamous chorus and its obligatory, terribly out of key Hey-y-eah-y-eahs.

His voice sounded horrible to his own ears, as high pitched and unsteady as a fourteen years old, when he soldiered through the "Heys" and the ensuing "Oohs".

Fitz kept his eyes firmly on the screen, purposefully avoiding to make eye contact with anyone, even Jemma, until he couldn't hold it in anymore. With trepidation he looked up and around, trying to evaluate the direness of situation.

Hunter was waving a lighter high above his head, his entire face split by an ear-to-ear grin.

Bobbi was beaming and shaking her head in consternation at the same time.

The rest of the crowd was split: half of the patrons were eagerly singing along, while the other half seemed to be ignoring them entirely.

The second verse was even more soul-crushing than the first one. As much as he tried to tone her down, Jemma was having none of it, and her inner little rebel was having the time of her life.

"I pray every single day for a REVOLUTIOOON," she growled, and Fitz had to admit he was impressed that such a small body could produce that deafening sound.

At long last, the acoustic outro came, and Fitz's ordeal finally drew to an end. The one half of the crowd that had been paying attention clapped enthusiastically, and a few middle-aged ladies hooted as Fitz and Jemma made their way back to the table hand in hand. Fitz's face felt hot enough that he worried it might never quite go back to normal, and he could only assume his current skin tone fell somewhere between spoiled tomato and cooked crawfish.

"You're a good boyfriend," Bobbi declared when he sat down, before kissing his cheek in a very sisterly way.

"Yeah, well done, very well done," Hunter clapped his back, the offensively gleeful smirk still firmly in place.

Jemma beamed to the both of them and started humming the air of Human League's Don't You Want Me, which was currently being defiled by a group of tone-deaf and inebriated business-type men, one of which was wearing his tie knotted around his head.

"You will never speak of this. Ever. To anyone. As long as we all live," Fitz ordered between gritted teeth, before he downed what was left of Hunter's beer in just a few large gulps.


End file.
